Marisa's Birthday Gift to Her Friend the Owl, by Vincent Spina

A Birthday Gift For My Friend the Owl, by Marisa, age 3 (USA) contemporary

Marisa's Birthday Gift to Her Friend the Owl

I

“What could she have been thinking”, a facebook friend
comments concerning the watercolour
I’ve posted.  At three years old minus one month,
could she tell us…could she detach herself
from the wash of colours to reflect
on what decisions she’d made to place a figure
or splash here and not there…how would she answer…

the inverted “C”, for instance, and 
the affiliated dashes and dots that occupy
the bottom half of the drawing paper.  Brushed
in light orange, it catches the eye first,
half encapsulating two deft strokes running 
parallel to each other in opposing green
whose route of escape—if they wished to escape--
is blocked at the entrance by a series 
of dots like black guards manning a blockade…

was she thinking at all…I mean
at that place when and where thinking is
a function of putting aside or away
a part of self—the part entangled with all
that is out there: for instance, the mocking bird
I’m hearing just now, proclaiming its right 
to be…

the part of self we never fully know 
or wonder about, the ease of opening 
our eyes to admit  the world 
into the wordless mind--

this continuance of see-er and seen
forgotten or put aside by degrees in exchange
for the piecing apart and attempt
of putting together of a seamless vision
no finger as yet has been laid upon
with supporting and opposing evidence.


II

Her mother texted me to say
she’d worked with total concentration—rare
at any age—on what was coming to light
in a wash of colours and when she’d finished,
in response to her mother’s question, she answered 
“It’s a birthday gift for my friend the owl.”

A series of black dots, alternating with haphazardly
colored dashes, marks a pathway beginning
at the bottom left and continuing 
below the inverted “C” (as if this figure
were being carried or floated to the right)

then spirals upward and around the “C” itself
where, at its midway point, the path forks
—the lesser path heading upward toward
the top half of the water colour, while 
the main path circles the “C”, mirroring it
in dots, where at a point further along,
a dash is prolonged into one more 
inverted “C” in a light wash 
of opposing green.

The black dots and coloured dashes proceed
to the right then spiral  upwards to divide 
the top half of the painting into two quadrants.
The left quadrant shows long splashes
in green, pink and blue, each separated
from the others like islands adrift
on a sea of white.

Two deeply coloured splashes in dark grey
and orange dominate the right quadrant
contrasting with while balancing
the left quadrant.  Seen now

in its entirety, the dots and dashes (some
mirroring the inverted “C” while others 
pulling us to where they wish to go, coiling,
curving around and seemingly carrying
the three principle images) hold 
the watercolour together.  

The painting is complete: a gift
to her friend the owl.


III

In Japan an artist may attempt a line
a thousand, maybe a million times
before he or she traces that first spontaneous line,
the one the emptied mind perceives and frees
to flow directly to the hand and fingers
to the brush and onto the rice paper

or before 
a lifeless son lies prone across the lap
of the mourning mother…what steps must she
repeat before the dancer is the dance?

The canvas occupies the whole floor space 
(or so it seems) as Lee Krasner sits
on a stool in the background as though watching 
over the process, while Jackson Pollack 
dribbles paint and sand onto the image
struggling into being at his feet
and under his straining body.  Think

(because without thought we are almost tool-less).  Think
of hot humid days along the southern coast 
of Eastern Long Island, of dreams drenched in alcohol,
waking with the taste of dust in your mouth.  Think

of the bitterness and the joy: Montauk pointing 
to sunrise across the endlessly rocking ocean
and home in the far Mid-West and how many
dribbles of paint it takes, how from a plan,
time after time delayed, altered, broken,
and from chance a pattern emerges.

I’ve seen graphs of the courses various 
sub-atomic particles may take
when the atom is smashed in a particle accelerator 
and it occurred to me that Jackson Pollock
was no abstract artist.  He painted energy,
the struggle to be…which was his soul…

and this time without thought, see
the watchful mother and the child painting
the birthday gift for her friend the owl.


IV

I think (which is my compensation 
for a mind no longer emptied, perhaps
my booby prize) is it energy that 
children paint—all the children:
those who have mommies and daddies who love them;
and the children locked in cages and those
without food who haunt the border between 
two states neither of which loves them, and those,
before they washed up, face down, along a beach
with all the ocean’s detritus.

But the steps, the thousand lines of ink,
the dribbled paint…can for one moment the mind,
emptied and mindful, open to the things 
of this world?

Once
and only once, a small pink rubber ball
was batted or punched across a poor
asphalt field—all the grinding city could afford--
and I, last to be chosen for a side
—and often out of charity—perceived 
the perfect arc through air, and without thought
became the catcher waiting at the end
of its curve…part of its curve.  It may happen.
It happened.

The gift is given.
We are the owl.

Vincent Spina

Vincent Spina is from Brooklyn, NY.  He is  a retired Associate Professor of Spanish Language and South American Literature.  Spina has published three books of poetry:  OUTER BOROUGH: Pecan Grove Press, 2008; DIALOGUE: The Poet’s Press, 2015; THE SUMPTUOUS HILLS OF GULFPORT: Lamar University Literary Press, 2017.  Recent poems have appeared In VOX POPULI, an online journal, VEXT, also online and THE BRIDGE LITERARY ARTS JOURNAL.